Astronomers Find Cosmic Sugar in Space: Milky Way News

EARTH, Laniakea Supercluster—The Milky Way may finally be living up to its name. Astronomers have found sugar drifting between the stars. The delicious discovery marks the first true sugar detected in interstellar space.

The molecule in question is erythrulose, a complex four-carbon sugar recently identified in deep space by researchers at Spain’s Center for Astrobiology.

While erythrulose itself isn't essential for life, it easily transforms into compounds related to threose nucleic acid (TNA), a molecule scientists think may have played a role in early prebiotic chemistry.

In other words, erythrulose may represent another step toward understanding how the chemical ingredients for life can form naturally in space. This discovery adds to a growing cosmic cookbook, suggesting that the chemistry needed for life may be more widespread than once thought.

Astronomers detected erythrulose by pointing radio telescopes at a dense molecular cloud located near the galactic center. The cloud, known as G+0.693−0.027, is one of the richest chemical environments known in the Milky Way.

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Using observations from the Yebes 40-meter and IRAM 30-meter radio telescopes, the team searched for the molecule's rotational "fingerprint." As molecules spin through space, they emit radio waves at specific frequencies, creating a unique sort of cosmic barcode that astronomers can use to identify them from thousands of light-years away.

The researchers compared these signals with precise laboratory measurements of erythrulose's spectrum to confirm its presence.

But finding the sugar was no piece of cake.

The surveyed cloud contains an extraordinary variety of molecules, and its spectrum is packed with thousands of overlapping signals.

"The cloud where we have discovered the sugar is one of the richest chemical repositories known in our galaxy," lead researcher Izaskun Jiménez-Serra told Milky Way News. "Its observed spectrum presents thousands of signals from a large number of molecular species. To detect erythrulose, we had to carry out the identification of over 180 molecular species to make sure that the erythrulose signals were due to this sugar and not to any other molecule."

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Beyond adding another molecule to the long list of over 340 that have been detected in the interstellar medium so far, this discovery could reshape how astronomers think complex molecules form in space.

Astronomers previously theorized that complex multi-carbon molecules grew sequentially in space, one carbon atom at a time. Yet erythrulose, a relatively complex four-carbon sugar, was detected in unexpectedly high abundance. The molecule may have found a shortcut, forming through a more efficient pathway than scientists once thought possible.

Even more intriguing is where astronomers found it. Unlike sugar-related compounds discovered in meteorites or samples returned from asteroid Bennu, erythrulose was detected directly within the interstellar medium. That means some of life's chemical ingredients may begin taking shape before stars and planets even exist, allowing young planetary systems to inherit some of the raw materials needed for life rather than producing them from scratch.

"This finding tells us that sugars, key ingredients for the origin of life, may form before stars and planets form," Jiménez-Serra said. "This opens up the possibility for these sugars to form in other clouds across the Galaxy, providing life's key ingredients for other young planetary systems."

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Jiménez-Serra and her team now plan to continue searching for even larger sugars in space, including ribose, the sugar that forms part of RNA.

By identifying increasingly complex molecules in interstellar space, astronomers hope to better understand how prebiotic chemistry unfolds under the harsh conditions between the stars. Every new molecule brings researchers a step closer to answering some of the universe’s biggest questions, including how and where life originated.

If sugars like erythrulose can form before stars and planets are born, the universe may have been cooking up the ingredients for life long before Earth was even on the menu.